The video game industry has been going through an exciting time of late, with several massive acquisitions taking place. Among the recent business deals, Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, while Sony purchased Bungie. However, it seems as though the news is far from over as Nintendo just made a notable purchase of its own.
Recently, Nintendo had announced its intention to grow its assets. This decision came as a result of the continued success of the Nintendo Switch in the video game market. Despite releasing in 2017, the Japanese video game company revealed that it had continued to make a substantial profit off the sales of the system. As a result, it was investing $880 million into game development, along with another $440 million in non-game entertainment software. While most of this was meant to expand the company internally, it recently decided to bring a long-time partner underneath its corporate umbrella.
In an announcement from February 24, it was revealed that Nintendo had acquired SRD Co. LTD. This news came via a statement from Nintendo. According to the company, the acquisition was made to “strengthen the management base of SRD.” In addition, it stated that this would “secure the availability of software development resources for Nintendo.” By doing this, the company hoped to improve the efficiency of future development. Furthermore, the statement read that the acquisition was scheduled to close on April 1, following approval. It is worth mentioning that the price of this business deal was not announced.
While this is a notable acquisition for Nintendo, it should not come as too much of a shock to gamers. Over nearly the last 40 years, SRD has worked closely with the gaming juggernaut on a number of properties. Some of the franchises it has played a part in developing include The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario. On top of this, it was even involved in the making of the original Donkey Kong. Most recently, it partnered on the development of Game Builder Garage, which was released last year.
While Nintendo does not regularly participate in acquisitions or mergers, this is not the first time the Japanese video game company has acquired another entity. Last year, it bought Next Level Games. Like with SRD, this was a big deal as the Canada-based company had worked on a number of popular Nintendo properties before, such as Luigi’s Mansion 3 and the Mario Strikers series.
It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Nintendo moving forward. With this newest asset under its belt, time will tell if this allows it to make even more polished games in the future.